be social – explaining social networks to librarians and parents

Posted on by jessamyn

I did a short tour of some New Hampshire libraries over the past few days. I did a little talk called MyWhat? Decoding social technologies.. It’s only about five slides but most of it was doing a tour of some of the more popular social networks [Facebook, MySpace, Flickr] and showing how they worked, how kids were using them and what parents and librarians should know.

Remember that a lot of the digital divide that we deal with now isn’t that people don’t have computers per se, it’s that they’re not in networks and groups of people that understand them and can answer complex questions about them. The library is often an integral link in this equation. A lot of my time at these talks is spent answering questions about how these social tools work, how I use them, how librarians might use them, and how kids and teens can use them safely and effectively. A lot of the print materials I’ve come across err on the side of caution which is not a bad idea but often there’s no “Hey you really SHOULD try this” couterpoint. I hope I was able to offer that somewhat.

but once libraries get to facebook, what do they do there?

Posted on by jessamyn

Jenny points out the UIUC library search which is a widget that can be put on any user’s facebook page so they can search the library catalog right from Facebook.

Facebook recently opened up their site to other applications and there has been a huge explosion in what people are sharing on their profile pages. From my own subjective perspective, it seems like these applications are getting more people to Facebook and keeping them there, doing stuff. In my 2.0 talks I have often talked about how libraries could create “presence” using social tools and I’ve pointed to Facebook groups like Awesome Resources which is a group of 30+ librarians doing what librarians do best: sharing resources and helping each other find things.

When I went to Ann Arbor this week, I connected with Ed “Superpatron” Vielmetti on Facebook and it’s one of the fastest and best ways to get ahold of a small subset of my friends. When I was at the Berkman Center event last week listening to them talk about Digital Natives (versus tired old “digital immigrants” like myself) a professor mentioned that they did a show of hands survey of their incoming class to Harvard this year and asked who had a Facebook page. The answer wasn’t “most of them” but every single one of them. Granted Harvard skews in some ways towards the clueful and plugged in, but what an opportunity, knowing the one place that all of your students go online. I’m not totally sure if we know what to there once we get there, and I share the same privacy concerns as others about how much information we’re aggregating and personally identifying there, but I also feel that the UIUC search box is a little breakthrough application, sort of the way LibX was for Firefox. Exciting times, no?

Mlibrary 2.0 (beta!) – Ann Arbor quickie trip

Posted on by jessamyn

So the kickoff to the Summer of MLibrary 2.0 was really fun today. I got to hear talks by Peter Morville and Kristin Antelman (whose name I am spelling correctly now) and give my own rambly talk about 2.0 stuff. The website for their summer project is really nifty if you haven’t seen it already. The site has a main lib 2.0 page, a list of events (hey there’s me!) and their 13 Things page which outlines some of the things they’ll be doing this summer. My slides and notes and links are on this page. Special thanks to Dave “Superman” Carter for inviting me, and Robyn Cleveland for her superb logistical assistance.

Now I’m hanging out at the Ann Arbor District Library catching up on my digital world and looking forward to having mac and cheese with Superpatron before heading to the airport. Next week I am giving a few short talks on social software for New Hampshire librarians and parents, then I’m done with travelling until… later. Anyone who is coming through Vermont is encouraged to stop by, I’d love to return some of the hospitality I’ve gotten on the road these past few months.

Here’s one post from someone who liveblogged my talk, let me know if there are any others floating out there.

MLibrary 2.0 this Friday

Posted on by jessamyn

I’ll be giving a short talk on 2.0 topics at the University of Michigan’s MLibrary 2.0 kickoff event tomorrow. Admission is free but the registration process is onerous. If you’re in the area, please persevere and come hear me and Peter “ambient findability” Morville and Kristen “NCSU digtal library” Antelman talk about techie library topics. Update: I had bad information about who was and wasn’t invited to this event. My apologies.

Open Source Software in Libraries

Posted on by jessamyn

Casey Bisson has written a Library Technology Reports issue on Open Source Software in Libraries with a chapter by yours truly. I got to install and run Mac and Windows versions of the more popular desktop open source applications and take screenshots and make recommendations. Of course it’s not hard to recommend something like Firefox with all its sexy add-ons and Greasemonkey scripts, but you might not know that VLC is a pretty good media player, or that for advanced users Gimp can do a lot of what Photoshop does for no cost. Now if we can just get our style guides properly updated to not suggest hyphenating it all the time, we’ll be golden.